Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Jam Night : Colleen Post 1

Tonight was a jamming marathon. We made 24 jams and 3ish different varieties.

Here you can see some of our previous weeks jam "Mango, White Peach, Cherry, Lime" and some of our supplies for the evening (Yellow Plums).

First jam of the evening was a "Lychee, Yellow Plum, Raspberry," working name "Apocalychee 2012."
We peeled the lychees, which are quite juicy and squirted everywhere, chopped the yellow plums and just threw in the raspberries. Since this is a jammie jam we immersion blended it. It is amazingly delicious, but so is all of our jams. ;)

Flavor enhancers! Lemon and ginger. Yum.

Here you can see Lauren microplaning ginger for flavor, as well as lemon zest. The microplane was used often this evening.

Fully zested and gingered the jam was ready to be cooked and pectinated. The whole thing takes about 20-30 mins to reach the right temperature and mix in the pectin and sugar. Then it's on to canning. We are using 8 oz cans, and saving two each for the county and state fairs. Hopefully we'll be able to move on to bigger productions soon.

Here just needs some lids and to be cook/sterilized. The variety of color in our mixed fruit jams is just fantastic.

Now it's on to Blueberry/Lemon jam. Our biggest batch of the evening.

Lauren juicing lemons for the jam. They were also zested and we put some of the peels in for aesthetic and flavor purposes. Plus is adds a little bit more pectin.

I'm cooking the berrys/lemon on a high heat. Mixing in the pectin and sugar. This is more of a preserve than a jam because there are large whole blueberries mixed in with the more syrupy liquid.

Lastly we made a Mango, Lime, Thyme, Raspberry. We wanted to experiment with maybe putting some herbs in the jam. Each jar has a sprig of thyme in them, hopefully it will add flavor to the jam over time. From what we tasted in the cooking process it was scrumptious.

Here you can see Rosie and Lauren in an assembly line situation. Lauren was cutting the mango while Rosie concentrated on the limes. Again we used the microplane here to zest the limes. I <3 the microplane.

Here is just a quick view of our set up. We jam in Jill's kitchen. It's got lots of space and she is our sensei of jam.

Lastly for the evening, here is a small group of the jams we made tonight with a few from last week.

NEWS: I will be is California for two weeks so Rosie, Lauren or Jill will keep you up to date on what's happening with the fair and how we are placing.

We are doing an invite only taste test of some of our jams, mostly likely the winners of the taste test will be the first available for purchase on Etsy. So, keep your eyes out for that announcement.